What’s the Difference?

Back when it first came out, I wrote a post about FAE. In short, FAE is a rules-light, fast-play, simplified version of the Fate Core rules. DFRPG is one of the complex iterations of the Fate3 rules, notably because of the magic system4. DFA is a simplified, fast-play version of DFRPG.

The Basic Mechanics

Like FAE, DFA uses approaches instead of skills. The six approaches for DFA are Flair, Focus, Force, Guile, Haste, and Intellect5. There are the standard four action types – Create Advantage, Overcome, Attack, and Defend – and the four standard outcomes – Succeed, Succeed with Style, Tie, and Fail.

Actions and conflict work pretty much the same as in FAE: roll dF, add it to your approach rating, and compare it to a target number. Levels of success in combat turn into stress, or into free invokes on created aspects.

Of course, there are aspects. Can’t have Fate without aspects. They work the same as in other Fate games, giving a bonus or reroll when you invoke them and spend a Fate point, and earning a Fate point when compelled.

There are, however, some new bits of mechanics that do some really interesting things.

Mantles

DFRPG used a thing called a Template to define your character’s basic powers and abilities. DFA calls roughly the same thing a Mantle. There’s a total of 24 Mantles in the book, covering everything from a clued-in mortal to magical practitioner to Santa’s seneschal6.

Each Mantle has a set of core stunts, optional stunts, and unique conditions7 that provide the special abilities and flavour of each character type. Mostly, you pick a single Mantle for your character, but a few Mantles, like Changeling or Red Court Infected, act more as templates – you create a character using one of the mortal Mantles, then add the supernatural Mantle.

You start with all the core stunts of your Mantle, and with the unique conditions. You also get one free stunt from the list of optional stunts. And, as with standard Fate games, you can choose to take more stunts in exchange for giving up a point of Refresh per stunt.

Conditions and Stress

Conditions are a very cool new piece of mechanics. Functionally, they’re like stress tracks in Fate, or predetermined consequences. Really, they’re aspects with an On/Off switch8. Each condition has a series of checkboxes – some have as few as one checkbox – and, in given situations, you mark one of the boxes9. Once the boxes are ticked, the associated aspect is turned on, until you meet whatever requirement the condition has to clear it.

Example? Sure!

Magical Practioners10 have a condition called Exhausted. It’s got one box. With the Evocation stunt, you can boost the effect of your spell by marking the box, which gives you some bonuses on trying to, for example, blast a vampire with sunlight. While the condition is marked, you have the Exhausted aspect, and the GM can invoke that to mess with you. In addition, in any scene that Exhausted would be a factor, the GM gets one free boost against you. If you take the necessary time to rest up, you can clear the condition, and you are no longer exhausted.

So, really, conditions are the category to which stress and consequences belong – tick the boxes and get a temporary aspect. And stress in DFA is reshaped a bit to help it fit that model better. By default, characters have six boxes of stress, and the conditions In Peril and Doomed. Stress is not divided into the mental, physical, and social tracks of DFRPG – there is only stress11. In Peril and Doomed act as predefined consequences – you can tick one of those conditions to offset greater amounts of stress. If you can’t buy off all the successful shifts of whatever you’re dealing with – punch, shot, fireball, psychic blast, or anything else – you’re taken out.

Now, as I mentioned in a footnote, some conditions kind of work in reverse: they start out marked, and get cleared in certain situations, turning that conditional aspect off. These are basically aspects that give your character special abilities, like Police Powers or Medical License, but that can be revoked due to your actions.

Why do I think this is such a neat little piece of game design? Because it’s a simple, adaptable way to create great variety and model a lot of different powers without having to come up with entirely new sub-systems for them. It is incredibly flexible, there are a whole slew of worked examples in the book to help you come up with new implementations, and it doesn’t increase the complexity of the characters very much. I mean, there’s always some increase in complexity when you add a new thing to track for a character, but because it’s so very similar to stuff you’re already tracking, that increase is minimal.

Stunts

I haven’t done an actual count, but my impression is that DFA has more actual stunts listed in the book than Fate Core does. It certainly has more than FAE does. This is because it takes everything that was a power in DFRPG and makes it a stunt. And also because the stunts integrate so closely with conditions that clear definitions of what some stunts do in relation to the conditions is pretty much required.

There’s also a discussion about how to create your own stunts, using the method from FAE.

Magic

This is the section I was most interested in13, when the game was announced. I was really curious to see how the flavourful-but-complex magic system from DRFPG was going to be implemented in the much-simpler FAE structure of DFA.

First, let’s talk evocation. Evocation is a stunt, and it lets you use elements to perform the four types of actions allowed in Fate Core. It’s got a couple of conditions tied to it – Exhausted and Burned Out – to model the way channeling that much raw energy can just tire you out. It’s just a standard action, tied to your approach, that you get to describe in a magical style; so, instead of a Forceful gun attack, it might be a Forceful fire attack. There’s none of the math that the DFRPG system required14, and a single roll instead of one roll to gather power and another roll to focus that power.

There’s also no need to track how good you are at the different elements. There are stunts that can give you a bonus using a certain element with a certain approach to accomplish a certain action, but that’s much simpler than the DFRPG method of calculating and tracking it15.

Overall, I like the new evocation. It’s cleaner and simpler and, though it may lack some of the risk and apprehension of the DFRPG method, it is loads faster and easier.

Now for thaumaturgy. While evocation gets about half a page of write-up in DFA, thaumaturgy gets its own chapter. Now, it’s a chapter of 13 digest-sized pages, compared to DFRPG‘s 26 full-sized pages, so it’s not really all that much. It is more complicated than evocation, of course – it’s more flexible and more powerful. In DFA, it’s only a single roll16 to use thaumaturgy, rather than the multiple rolls to prepare the spell and gather and focus the power in DFRPG.

There is some math in this type of magic. You really kind of need to do a little math to have the sort of flexibility that thaumaturgy has in the source material17. You build spells by determining what stunts and/or conditions the spell brings into being. So, if you want to, say, use magic to turn you and everything you’re carrying into a cat, that’s +4 for the Physical Transformation (lasting) condition, and +2 for the Shifting Adept stunt, giving the spell a difficulty of Fantastic (+6). See? Simple math.

Now, instead of having to make up a Lore deficit18, you add up the costs, based on the conditions and stunts in the spell. So, for our shapeshifting spell above, it requires four costs: one for the stunt, three for the lasting condition. Then you make the roll against the difficulty. How well you roll determines who gets to pick the costs; you, the GM, or both taking turns.

Costs are narrative complications or resources expended: time for completing the ritual, rare components you need, help that you need19, special circumstances like times or places, or the spell not quite working correctly. This basically replaces the before-the-roll spell preparation in DFRPG with an after-the-roll determination of the story of the spell. It also determines if you need to make any other rolls for the spell to work – maybe it takes a roll to get you hands on a bit of the target’s hair, for example.

Note that this method makes thaumaturgy much more reliable and safe than in DFRPG, though a bad roll may result in the GM picking costs that you can’t obtain or aren’t willing to accept. This means that, if your ritual spell fails, it’s usually because you choose for it to fail rather than expend the resources or accept the costs required. And that’s interesting to me.

One last note about thaumaturgy: there are four example spells in the chapter, each about a page long. Two of those examples don’t actually use the ritual magic rules, and are examples of when to use these specialized rules and when to use the standard FAE-style actions. This is incredibly useful in opening up the concept of only using these more complicated rules20 when they actually add something to play, and modeling things using the regular mechanics otherwise. Good advice, and good examples.

A few other notes about magic:

Sponsored magic is handled by stunts and conditions in the mantles. It really helps simplify the whole sponsored magic stuff, which was a weak part in DFRPG ((To be fair, it was really cleared up in The Paranet Papers, which I reviewed here.)).

The Sight is a condition called The Third Eye, and using it is risky to your sanity. Clear, simple guidance on it.

Soulgaze is a stunt, and again, there’s clear, simple guidance.

Enchanted Item is a stunt that lets you pull a useful magic item out of your pocket once per session. Individual, permanent magic items, like the Wardens’ silver swords, are singular stunts on their own.

All in all, the magic system in DFA does a really good job of simplifying the DFRPG magic system without sacrificing very much in the way of flavour or flexibility.

Scale

The Dresden Files novels have creatures of vastly different levels of power facing off against each other. Supernatural creatures vs. mortals, wizards vs. fey nobility, stuff like that. DFA has the concept of scale to address that. There are five different scales: Mundane, Supernatural, Otherworldly, Legendary, and Godlike. Going up against a force of a different scale provides the higher-scaled side a significant bonus, based on the difference in scales.

This bonus is a big deal, but there are ways around it, as demonstrated in pretty much every Dresden Files story out there. As DFA says:

Wizard Dresden is an expert at finding the Achilles’ [sic] heel of superior foes.

Other Stuff

Just a quick rundown of some other things I think you should know about the game:

It’s got all the customization stuff you’d expect from an FAE game: building your own setting, GMCs, stunts, Mantles, and so on.

It’s also got a complete prebuilt setting, with GMCs and playable characters.

The advancement system is very simple, but there’s some good advice on advancing the setting along with the players.

It’s great fun to read, with lots of useful examples and amusing marginalia.

The art is clean and evocative, and there’s lots of it.

It’s a digest-sized book, like all the other Fate Core books.

The background covers up to Skin Game in the Dreden Files books. So, y’know, spoilers.

It’s waaaaaay easier to carry than DFRPG.

Our Story and The Paranet Papers for DFRPG are useful sourcebooks for DFA, but aren’t required.

Conclusion

I really like this game. Really. Reading it has got me looking at my game schedule to see if I can fit a new game in21, because I want to gather a group to play.

It’s a nice version of Dresden Files, vastly simplifying the system without sacrificing the cool flavour and flexibility of the game. If your a fan of Harry Dresden in any of his incarnations, I recommend picking it up.

You know you want to.

To be clear, the stretch goal was that they would develop DFA, not that you’d get DFA as part of your Fate Core Kickstarter. They were very clear that this was not going to happen right away. And it didn’t. But it did happen, just like they promised. [↩]

Think I’ve linked enough things in those two sentences? Feels like a lot of links. [↩]

8 Responses to Speedy Dresden

Thanks for reviewing! I enviously devoured all of your DFRPG articles and campaigns but never was able to get a group together to run. (Hard to introduce a new system to a group when you want to be a player.) Now that DFA is out I’ve been thinking of trying again and hearing from you with your multi-DFRPG-campaign experience that it looks good while still staying true to the source material is a big green checkmark.

Hi there, thanks for the detailed review! I’m really glad you enjoyed the book. One point on conditions, though: They don’t actually count as/grant an aspect unless the text explicitly says they do OR the table promotes them to aspects in play through consensus.

You get an associated aspect when you check In Peril or Doomed, but Medical License and Exhausted are NOT aspects. Exhausted gives the GM a single boost to use against you in a subsequent scene and that’s all. Likewise, Medical License isn’t an aspect, it just gives you the permission to do certain things with your medical authority.

What this means is that the costs associated with conditions (e.g. your sponsor coming to hassle you to repay your debt you’ve racked up using Indebted) don’t reward fate points, but it also doesn’t cost you fate points to activate conditions in the first place.

This means that conditions straddle the line between facts and aspects in really quite an interesting way.

Of course, if a condition becomes a big deal in the game, or the player negotiates it (for example, because they want a compel on Exhausted) you can promote one to an aspect at any time, just like any other fact. Or, you can use a create advantage roll to gain leverage over a condition.

Thanks for the clarification on conditions! I overlooked the way they don’t necessarily act as aspects with regard to the fate point economy on my read-through. One of the hazards of reviewing after only READING the game, rather than actually playing it.

No problem at all. It’s not quite how they were portrayed in the early draft of the book, and it’s a departure from the way conditions are ALWAYS aspects in the Fate System Toolkit, where they were first used.

I think the primary motivation for changing the way they work so they aren’t always aspects was the weirdness about who got the free invoke when you marked a condition like Hungry.

Okay, so, I voluntarily mark a point of Hungry. I am now subject to the Hungry aspect, and that means I also… give myself a free invoke? Because I’m the one who caused me to mark the track? Huh.

With the way it works now, Hungry has a potential cost (If you’re taken out you may go on a killing frenzy). It is also a fact that can be leveraged with a create advantage action, or promoted to an aspect by table consensus if you agree.

For example,

“Sure, I have four boxes of Hungry, I agree it’s a big thing in this scene so let’s make it an aspect.”

Or,

“I’ve only got one box of Hungry ticked. Sure, I’m mildly hungry but you don’t have a Hungry aspect just because you skipped breakfast, so why should I for the vampiric equivalent?”

I find the way the DFA form of conditions bridges facts and aspects quite fascinating, and it’s a useful perspective to bring to things like incriminating information. Such things *might* be an aspect, but until you decide they are they’re just facts that with their own narrative effects quite beyond the mechanics of invokes and compels.